


Fixed

by ion_bond



Category: Daredevil (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Enhanced Senses, Ethical Dilemmas, Foggy's tattoo, Friendship, Gen, Nelson & Murdock, New York City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-14
Updated: 2008-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-24 19:33:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3781756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ion_bond/pseuds/ion_bond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Swiping your Metrocard and running full-tilt into the barrier, the metal to the gut when it doesn’t give like it’s supposed to, or stepping down for a stair that isn’t there and you’re falling ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fixed

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically comicverse, following “The Devil in Cellblock D” arc, but the only specialized knowledge you might need is that Foggy was presumed dead but was in witness protection and that Matt was in Rikers.
> 
> Also, in comic book canon (sometimes!), Matt's died when Matt was in college, not when he was a kid.

Foggy sets down two beers on the blotter with a muffled double bang, and sits heavily in the chair on the other side of Matt’s desk. Becky has gone home for the day; so have the interns, the paralegals and the administrative assistant. Downstairs in building security, the night guy has taken over the desk, but the plumber who promised to be here between noon and five still hasn’t shown up.

The beers aren’t cold. Matt cannot guess where Foggy has been hiding them, but he doesn’t care. That’s how things have been around here.

Matt opens the first bottle and winces -- it wasn’t supposed to be a twist-off. He hands the beer across to Foggy and knocks the top off the second with one quick rap against the edge of the desk. He feels it hitting the carpet under the desk, where the janitorial staff can find it later. Drinking in the office doesn’t hold a candle to certain other things he’s done to his professional reputation.

“What a month,” says Foggy. He takes a long, appreciative gulp and rests the bottle on his wool-poly-rayon blend knee. “God doesn’t actually stop with what He knows a person is strong enough to handle,” he says.

It's a joke, mostly; he’s referring to the plumber and the stubborn, monotonous drip which Matt can hear, wearing at the tiles of the bathroom floor down the hall. Foggy doesn’t believe in God, but he’s reflective tonight; relaxed, not unhappy. It’s in the texture of his voice. This is an opening. Matt sits back in his cushioned desk chair and waits for it, whatever it is.

A beer after work. He remembers coming home to the dark apartment on summer evenings as an elementary school student, his father with the vinyl-skinned ottoman pushed up close to the window, smoking a cigarette into the fan he had turned so that it blew the smoke out into the street, the lit orange tip and the orange streetlight outside casting his face in relief. It was after Matt’s mother left but before his accident, and if things had seemed tough to him then, they would be tougher later. “Matty,” he can hear his father say, deep voice echoing down the years. There would be a can of beer sweating on the sill, but Jack was sober, the cigarette-hand shaking slightly, his giant, hunched body dwarfing the ottoman. “Where have you been?”

“At the library,” Matt would have said. Not a lie, at age eight; he might have spent all day at the Columbus branch on 10th Avenue in between 50th and 51st, reading old Mets coverage in the microfiche machine.

“Good boy,” his father would have said.

“I’m living proof,” says Foggy now. “That God doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you can handle. He gives you whatever He feels like.”

“God’s not perfect,” says Matt. “Tell me something new.”

“I have a tattoo,” says Foggy.

“Beg pardon?” Matt heard him -- of course he heard him -- but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have misunderstand.

“Yep,” says Foggy. “Really. I got it at a place in SoHo last year. Picked it out of a book. It’s sort of a tribal thingy. Just a pattern. Polynesian-inspired.“ Matt pictures the daggers and angels and faded shamrocks his father’s friends wore. Styles have changed. Foggy’s shirt crackles as he sits up straighter. “It’s hard to describe,” he says. “I don’t know, maybe you could feel it.”

Matt smiles. “Maybe. Where is it?”

“On my arm.”

Matt puts his own beer on the desk. “OK.”

There was a time, just after Battlin’ Jack went down, when Matt believed that food was spoiling all around him. Milk in particular -- he always thought the milk was going bad. He could smell the gasp of decay after the plastic cap was removed, the cruel scent of the dried milk-crust around the rim of a gallon jug overpowering the smell of the good milk inside. His fingers slipped over the date stamp on the pebbly plastic, smearing the ink. He couldn’t read it. Couldn’t drink it. He had to ask Foggy -- had to rely on his friend, with his sinuses his allergies, his blinkered non-super senses -- to check for him.

Foggy loosens his tie and opens his button-down partway. He pulls up the sleeve of his cotton tee-shirt. “Here,” he says, taking Matt’s hand and positioning it.

His bicep is warm under Matt’s fingers. There is hard muscle there buried under a layer of pudge. His skin is smooth. Matt can barely tell where the ink is. He presses in, grips harder, feeling blood flowing through veins and capillaries, but he can’t get a sense of the design. “Very nice,” he says anyway. “What color is it?”

“Just black,” Foggy tells him.

It all goes to show that Matt is not infallible. His judgment isn’t stronger, isn’t keener than anyone else’s. He’s just got access to a different standard of evidence.

Paranoia is what it was, the year of the spoiled milk. His senses suddenly seemed too strong, even for him, and he was afraid of what he might find in his dirty city. Things that had always been there suddenly terrified him. All the smells of Hell’s Kitchen -- the belch of the subway system, the puke miasma of doorways and alleyways, building lobbies and dumpsters, the blood of the son Jesus Christ on Sunday mornings -- made him think of the blood of his father, yes, his father, Jack Murdock, spilling onto the pavement. He was afraid to breathe in for a while.

He might get the same way about people -- he would, if he let it happen. Matt can sense that about himself. He sees them at their worst, and they lie, even the clients who did not break a law. It’s hard for him to blame them; he lies sometimes, too.

But it’s hard to trust them.

After finishing law school, Matt spent seven months as a legal aid attorney in Queens County. He'd thought it was his calling, what he wanted to do. Most of his clients disliked him, because most of them lost their cases. They were from neighborhoods like his, or worse, and he tried for them -- he did. He made motions to suppress bad evidence and advised them to plea to a lesser charge and got them into drug treatment programs. He did the best he could. Most of his clients were guilty, then.

The innocent ones sometimes lost their cases, too.

The empty office is as close to silent as it ever gets, aside from the insistent leak. “So when were you planning to tell me about the ink?” Matt asks.

“Don’t even ride me about this, buddy,” Foggy says. “Don’t you dare. You have no moral high ground left when it comes to secret-keeping.”

He has hurt Foggy. He knows it. “Or to doing stupid things,” Matt acknowledges.

“Are you calling the tattoo you can’t see stupid?”

“Yeah,” says Matt, “I guess I am.” He tries to imagine Foggy somewhere smelling of fear, sweat and ink, briefcase between his legs, while a big man ten years younger holds a buzzing tattoo gun to his flesh. They’re not kids anymore. “Sorry. It’s not really fair of me.”

Foggy grunts good-naturedly. He got _shot_ because of Matt. This is never far from Matt’s mind.

“Life isn’t fair,” Matt says. They remind each other of this all the time.

“Our job isn’t fair, even,” Foggy says. “That’s what’s fucking ironic: the American judicial system.”

Matt shrugs. They’ve had this conversation before, of course. They’ve had it for years. “How did witness protection stack up?” he asks.

“Favorably.” Foggy's voice is morose. “The Marshals didn’t ask that much of me. All they needed was some lying and some light math, but I couldn’t hack it. I’m just not cut out for a double life -- not like you hero types. Look at you, Matt. You get along fine, obviously. You lend credence to the old ‘God gives us what we can handle’ theory --”

“You know, people have been saying that to me since I was twelve years old, starting with my father.”

Across the desk from him, Foggy's breathing is steady and comfortable. “Yeah, sorry to join the chorus. And nobody but me even knows the half of it.”

Milla knows. She knew from the start, before he learned to trust her -- and that’s not fair to her, either -- but she doesn’t _understand._

You can find CompStat crime statistics online. Matt has watched the number of rapes and felonious assaults in the 10th Precinct go down while the numbers in the One-Three next door go up. He wonders if he’s doing any good at all, in the balance.

Did Matt's father believe that he was winning the first fixed fights, fair and square? If Battlin’ Jack could hear heartbeats the way Matt can, would he have kept fighting those early matches until they told him to take a dive? Matt thinks that he would have. He'd been pushing fifty, slow from the years of pain and alcohol and disappointment already behind him. He must have known.

That said, wouldn’t it have been more honorable -- knowing the fights he was winning were fixed -- for Jack to see it through to the end, to play by the rules all the way, lay down and stay down through the pre-arranged finale? Wouldn't that have been more fair?

Matt isn’t sure.

These are the tastes that every New Yorker has: swiping your Metrocard and running full-tilt into the barrier, the metal to the gut when it doesn’t give like it’s supposed to, or stepping down for a stair that isn’t there and you’re falling. There is an initial shock, then hurt that turns to annoyance and suspicion. Perhaps nothing is to be trusted. These minor breakdowns of authority, the tiny city betrayals that happen to everyone, they reveal what it is sometimes like to be a blind person. Or so Milla tells him. Matt doesn’t know, he can't _understand_ , but he can make an educated guess. This was how, for most of his career, he almost knew what it felt like for a defendant to hear the judge pronounce guilty.

Almost. He'd experienced only how a verdict felt to him, echoing across the courtroom to where he sat, files at his fingertips, helpless, his client’s heartbeat fluttering in the air.

Then, one day, he felt it himself.

Betrayal. That was what it was like for him in Riker’s. Like missing a step, a piece of himself and the world in which he belonged, all at once. Like losing a sense.

He wants to know what it was like for Foggy to be dead, but can’t bring himself to ask. There are a lot of things for which Foggy hasn’t ever forgiven him. He knows. Honest men lie, too.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” Matt says. It's God's truth. He wonders if there’s any more beer. The leak drips, unrepaired, and outside, it’s starting to rain.

He understands that some things don't get mended.

FIN.


End file.
